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U.S.|Harvard Relents After Protracted Fight Over Slave Photos
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/us/harvard-slavery-daguerreotypes-lawsuit.html
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A legal battle between Harvard and a woman who says two slave portraits are of her ancestors will end in a settlement, with the photos going to a Black history museum in South Carolina.
May 28, 2025Updated 8:16 a.m. ET
Harvard University will relinquish its ownership of two haunting images of an enslaved father and his daughter after settling a six-year legal battle with a woman who says she is their descendant.
The images, two 175-year-old daguerreotypes that were taken for a Harvard professor and used as evidence for a discredited pseudoscientific theory of Black racial inferiority, will not, however, go to the woman who sued for them, Tamara Lanier. Instead, they are expected to be transferred, along with images of five other enslaved people, to the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., the state where the subjects were enslaved.
The settlement comes as Harvard deals with an onslaught of litigation as it tries to fight off President Trump’s efforts to cripple the university. Ms. Lanier cheered the outcome of her case, which will be announced on Wednesday.
“I have been at odds with Harvard over the custody and care of my enslaved ancestors, and now I can rest assured that my enslaved ancestors will be traveling to a new home,” Ms. Lanier said in an interview. “They will be returning to their home state where this all began, and they will be placed in an institution that can celebrate their humanity.”
A Harvard spokesman said the university was always eager to place the images in an appropriate public location, and one has not been selected.
“While we are grateful to Ms. Lanier for sparking important conversations about these images, it is inaccurate to say that Harvard resisted her ‘requests,’” James Chisholm, the spokesman, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This was a complex situation, particularly since Harvard has not confirmed that Ms. Lanier was related to the individuals in the daguerreotypes.”
